The Sex Drives of Men and Women

An exhaustive review of studies on sexuality published from the 1960s to 2000, asserted in every sex-drive-related metric, men demonstrated stronger urges than women, according to Discovery’s How Things Work.

Psychologists from a Case Western Reserve University review emphasized the male sex drive doesn't just represent a moment of time. Rather it spans age groups, marital status and sexuality.

Roy Baumeister, a Florida State University social psychologist, wrote WebMD, found that men reported more spontaneous sexual arousal and had more frequent and varied sexual fantasies.

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Masturbation is considered by sex researchers to be one of the purest measures of sex drive, because it isn’t constrained by external factors such pregnancy or disease, said PsychologyToday.com.

Discovery wrote that 94.6 percent of males 25 to 29 masturbate. For women it’s 84.6 percent.

PsychologyToday.com wrote that men initiate sex often and rarely refuse it. Women initiate it much more rarely and refuse it more often than men.

Women don’t always seem to know what turns them on, reported WebMD.

Northwestern University researcher Meredith Chivers and colleagues showed erotic films to gay and straight men and women. Then they asked about the participant’s level of sexual arousal, and measured actual levels of arousal through devices attached to their genitals.

Women exhibited more heightened responses across the board, regardless of their sexual identification, said Discovery. Males, on the other hand, were titillated according to their self-identified sexual preferences.

It seems that men have every incentive to have sex passed along in their genes, wrote WebMD. In contrast, women may be hard-wired to carefully choose their partners, because they can get pregnant.

They are also likely to be more attuned to relationship quality because they want a partner who will stay around to take care of and support the child.

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